Mini Reviews for September 19 - 25, 2022

In case you missed it, my wife and I released a new episode of our podcast The Newbery Chronicles. This time, we're discussing The Witch of Blackbird Pond! Listen to it here if you're interested.

 

Movies

Romancing the Stone (1984)
Not without its pleasures (principally, Danny DeVito and the croc-filled climax), but it's weirdly inert for an African Queen riff with a blood transfusion from Indiana Jones (though about as racist as that combo suggests). And it's especially inert for a Robert Zemeckis feature from this era. The ironic sleazeball tendencies of early Zemeckis just feel straightforwardly sleazeball here, probably not helped by the co-leading Michael Douglas (the sleazeballest of sleazeball screen presences from this era; truly baffling how much of an A-list star he was, given how consistently off-putting he is in his movies—'twas a different time, I suppose). Kathleen Turner is good, though, and much more keyed into the African Queen vibes than Douglas is. Grade: B-

 

The Alchemist Cookbook (2016)
I keep having to remind myself that I watched this movie, because it just keeps sliding off my brain. Ty Hickson and Amari Cheatom are both very good in their respective roles, and all of writer/director Joel Potrykus's proclivities for mixing bleak horror with the mundane ephemeral of male and geek culture are on full display (including one particularly striking scene involving cat food that feels like a dry run for the disgusting challenges of Relaxer). But I dunno, this feels minor compared to Buzzard and Relaxer, and I think there's just too much micro-indie "futzing around in the woods because we don't have sets otherwise" stuff for it to be as memorable as those other movies. Grade: C+

 

 

The Gate to the Mind's Eye (1994)
A lot less ineffable and a lot more music-video-y than the previous Mind's Eye films, but still pretty cool. There's a distinctly PS1-prerendered-cutscene vibe to these ones in particular that is fitting of the era. Also, the version I watched on YouTube was a LaserDisc rip, so there were a couple of load screens, which is a nice period detail. Grade: B

 

 

 

 

Ocean Waves (海がきこえる) (1993)
Easily my least-favorite Studio Ghibli movie I've seen that isn't Earwig and the Witch. I'm not against high school melodrama, and it's theoretically interesting to see Ghibli operating on that gear. But this movie is sooooo narratively inert. I have no idea why I'm supposed to care about anything that happens here, not because it's stupid and low-stakes (not necessarily a deal-breaker with high school melodrama) but because none of the emotions experienced by the characters are convincingly evoked by the movie. It's not even visually engaging; the animation is warm and competent, but it's thoroughly anonymous. This was kind of by design: the whole point of the project was for Ghibli to allow its younger animators to practice making a movie on the cheap, and I guess you get what you pay for. Grade: C

 

Capricorn One (1977)
Starts out as a fairly cool idea for a '70s paranoid thriller (what if the government didn't fake the moon landing but they faked a Mars landing to save face after the real mission ran into technical difficulties amid public-private corruption at the twilight of Watergate and the dawn of neoliberal creep?) that is just a bit too dumb to mine all the promise from that premise—the kind of dumb that thinks that you have to get on a plane to travel from Houston to Galveston, or that you should have a pivotal emotional scene involve a mother breaking down into sobs as she reads Fox in Socks to her kid (though as a parent, I can honestly say: same). Somewhere along the line, though, probably right around the 2/3 mark, when Elliott Gould becomes the protagonist (always a good move for a movie to make), this shifts gears into something a lot more openly goofy and thus makes what were intellectual and tonal liabilities in the front half of the movie actual virtues of the second half, and by the end, this has righted the ship into a dumb-fun blast. Gould is extremely good as a down-on-his-luck journalist who gets into increasingly absurd situations as a result of being two degrees of separation from the conspiracy, and the way his plot slowly drifts into full-on screwball comedy is really entertaining. The helicopter/crop-duster chase at the climax is legit great, too. What a weird movie. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for May 24 - 30, 2021

 Potty training the son this weekend. So much pee.

Movies

Oxygen (Oxygène) (2021)
Very solid premise (woman wakes up with no memories in an airtight cryogenic chamber, has to find out what's going on/escape before her air runs out) executed tightly. As with director Alexandre Aja's previous feature, Crawl, this movie knows exactly what it is and executes that to perfection, but unlike Crawl, what this is doesn't truly reveal itself until about halfway through, resulting in a movie that's not nearly as tight (not to say that it's slack, which it isn't) but is also a lot more thoughtful than the killer gators movie. It's also basically a one-woman show, and the one woman, Mélanie Laurent, is excellent. It's not going to blow your mind, as even with its several left turns it still stays pretty comfortably within the confines of the kind of Netflix genre thriller that it is. But as Netflix genre thrillers go, this is one of the better ones. Grade: B+

Minari (2020)
I'm surprised that more people aren't commenting on the religious nature of this movie. Genuinely shocked to find out that this is structurally an inspirational faith-based movie? Those of you who have read my reviews for a while might assume I mean that as a pejorative, but I don't in this case, because Minari is a good movie. But the presence of a lot of Evangelical media tropes are striking. I mean, we have:
-A patriarch who upends his family's life by taking a "leap of faith" that may or may not be compromised by financial motives
-Rural vs. urban tension
-A "back to the land" romanticism
-Marital tension surrounding said leap of faith wherein the matriarch is inevitably the naysayer
-A sick child whose family prays for him and who is healed (or healing) by the end
-Folksy wisdom delivered by a pious and wholesome (albeit quirky) outsider
-A climactic, possibly divinely ordained loss that simultaneously purifies the motives of the patriarch while also resolving said marital tensions while preserving the premise of the leap of faith
What sets Minari from the absolute garbage produced by the Evangelical media industry (besides the fact that its filmmakers understand, like, basic filmmaking craft—shockingly not a given among Evangelical filmmakers) is that its characters respond like real human beings to these tropes. The leap of faith is realistically (and depressingly) tempered by the patriarch and matriarch continuing to work in a factory as a safety net; the marital tensions feel genuine, with the threat of large quantities of money borrowed from banks hanging over their heads; the climactic loss is legitimately a debilitating loss, not merely a plot contrivance; the pious (if quirky) outsider is treated with ambivalence and appropriate suspicion that he might be a conman; the church environment of the film is less wholesome than it is vaguely off-putting and hokey, and the parents decide they would rather work in the factory than go there; the sick child does dip and tricks his grandmother into drinking his pee; the characters swear. All of this and the fact that the film comes from an Asian-American and immigrant perspective, which of course changes everything and allows this to be a lot more implicitly and even openly critical of white American Christianity (and white American capitalism) than your typical Evangelical movie about some generic white Christian jerks. As much as I'm loath to admit it, a movie as good as Minari does suggest that the narrative ideas of faith-based inspirational filmmaking can be successfully decoupled from the dopey fundamentalism and racist Christian nationalism that undergirds that scene. Which is honestly disappointing to me on a certain level—would have liked to see both go down with the ship. But at least Minari is very good. Grade: B+

Afterschool (2008)
A bleak, astonishing, rattle-me-to-my-bones movie. It's a truly visionary treatise about the role of shared digital media and online forums on the adolescent male psyche, made at the near-dawn of that era, told by way of an extremely patient, slow-cinema-adjacent pacing and intentionally ugly digital footage juxtaposed with intentionally incompetently framed film footage—a description that I'm sure sounds insufferable to many people, and to be sure, this is definitely Not For Everyone. But I found this incredible and nearly one-of-a-kind. Slow cinema seems so perfect for exploring the tedium and repetition of school that I'm surprised more people haven't done it, and as far as its exploration of online video sharing and social media on the adolescent sense of self and relation to others, I feel like the only other movies I can think of that have taken that seriously are Unfriended and Eighth Grade, both far different movies from this one, which is as much informed by the darkly empathic visions of teenagerhood of novelist Robert Cormier as it is with the contemporary YA media that clearly influenced both of those other movies. As such, it feels like the specific layers of humanity this movie peels back remain mostly untouched in the larger context of cinema. Would actually love to see a 2021 update/spiritual successor of this movie with smartphones and Snapchat and stuff—this movie is a fascinating time capsule of the like 3-4 years between the popularizing of YouTube/social media and the permanent fusing of those things to our hips via the mass adoption of the iPhone, and I also think there is a rich, rich vein to be tapped by this movie's approach applied to our contemporary digitally augmented life. Grade: A

Saw (2004)
I was completely onboard with this movie for the first 20 minutes or so when it was basically a single-location escape room/point-and-click adventure game with two potentially unreliable blank-slate characters. The more flashbacks and exposition the movie added, though, the dumber it got, without ever being quite dumb enough to ascend to an entertainingly dumb movie, so I fell off by the end. I guess I either want that lean single-location film or a borderline-cartoonish movie full of ludicrously elaborate traps and double-crosses and sadistic games—no in-between. That said, director James Wan sells this probably better than most would, and his technique is a beautiful aesthetic snapshot of a different era: a fun reminder that for a few years there at the beginning of the new millennium, seeing people writhe around in fast-motion was supposed to be the scariest thing ever. Grade: C

Used Cars (1980)
There's a lot of fun to be had in this Robert Zemeckis/Bob Gale comedy, from Kurt Russell's deliriously sleazy performance as the central used car salesman to the intricately structured jokes to the pitch-black cynicism. But somewhere along the line, that cynicism curdles into the distasteful and sometimes chauvinist spite that often animates the '80s/'90s (particularly the '80s) generation of American comedies. A lot of these early Robert Zemeckis movies are thrilling in the way that they seem to be weaponizing Boomer culture against itself (in the case of Used Cars, the particular kind of capitalism and local politics being built by the then newly emergent adult Boomer middle class) and thereby presenting a critique of the soon-to-be ruling class, but something like Used Cars ultimately reveals the limitations of the Zemeckis/Gale approach. In their comedies, and a lot of the comedies inspired in their wake (e.g. Caddyshack), there's this pervasive understanding that the world as presented by the well-mannered establishment is a steaming pile of bullshit but with a perspective so myopic and self-centered that it is unable to see the systemic forces that have shat that steaming pile and are forcing us all to stand waist-deep in it—instead, this perspective usually just finds a rather thin idea of The Man (or often The Woman, though less so here than in other comedies of the era, despite the really awful bit of forced female nudity here) warmed over from whatever hungover memories of '60s radicalism that white people in the '80s liked to recite to themselves as a way to justify voting for Ronald Reagan in a way that didn't openly admit to their own reactionary impulses. Anyway, it might be unfair to load all this baggage on a silly, often pretty entertaining movie like Used Cars except that Used Cars does seem to want to make some sort of statement about America, a statement that's halfway good but, like the movie itself, has a hard time sustaining itself as it's forced to explain itself over the course of nearly two hours. Grade: B-

100 Years...100 Movies 76-78: Forrest Gump, All the President's Men, Modern Times

Hello all! I'm working my way through AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, giving thoughts, analyses, and generally scattered musings on each one. For more details on the project, you can read the introductory post here.

Three very different movies in this post. And... that's all I have to say about that.

76. Forrest Gump (1994, Robert Zemeckis)
Look, everyone, unlike a lot of contemporary critics, I don't hate Forrest Gump (in fact, I even like it), and that whole "Forrest Gump vs. Pulp Fiction at the Oscars" is pretty dumb because, come on, I think we all know that the right position in that debate is actually The Shawshank Redemption. But I've never understood the huge, huge cultural cachet the film has with contemporary audiences. I mean, it's a pleasant movie that, somewhat amusingly, plays lip service to Baby Boomer culture while also positing that said culture is basically the accidental offspring of a mentally challenged man from Georgia. There are some truly groundbreaking effects used throughout, too, and consequently, the film has a winsomely, even at times anarchically, playful streak with history (e.g. Forrest mooning LBJ), which makes the whole affair a little less self-aggrandizing and more punk than the movie's detractors give it credit for. Oh, and the acting is uniformly excellent, too. So no, I'm not immune to the movie's charms. But a generation-defining movie? A great movie? One of the greatest movies movies of all time? I don't see it. Of course, people are allowed to have their own opinions, and I wouldn't dream of telling people they're wrong (or dumb or evil or whatever) to love this movie. But to those who do love Forrest Gump, I have a few questions I sincerely want answers to: 1) What exactly is profound about having Forrest experience or orchestrate so many of the late 20th century's cultural touchstones? It's funny, but what does it mean? 2) How is Forrest anything other than a blank slate of a character, and how does this make him a compelling protagonist? 3) What is the film doing with Jenny other than creating a love interest for Forrest? What's the point in transforming her from a character with personal tragedies (abusive father, etc.) into one who shoulders Society's tragedies (post-hippie fallout, etc.)? It seems like the movie really, really wants her to represent something about the Boomer generation, but what? 4) Why is "Run, Forrest, run!" one of this movie's go-to quotes? It's not funny, deep, clever, poignant, or anything. I mean, Forrest has to run away from kids pelting him with rocks (and pretty big rocks, too!); that's a dark context for a quote shouted willy-nilly at runners everywhere, isn't it?

77. *All the President's Men (1976, Alan J. Pakula)
You'll have to forgive me if I'm a bit over-the-moon about this one. See, when it's done well, the based-on-a-true-story thriller (e.g. Zero Dark Thirty), particularly in its more political shades (Charlie Wilson's War, Lincoln), is one of my favorite movie genres ever, and it's an even greater favorite when that genre mixes in a healthy excitement for journalistic rigor (Zodiac). Ladies and gentlemen of the blogosphere, All the President's Men is just such a thriller, and a masterpiece of one, too. It's definitely one of the best movies I've watched for the first time for this 100 Years...100 Movies project, and by golly, there's a really good chance that it will go on to become a new favorite of all time for me. It's funny, tense, insightful, and genuinely exciting, impressive characteristics in their own right made all the more impressive by the fact that this film achieves them almost entirely through dialogue. I mean, think about this: All the President's Men is a movie with no chase scenes and no killings (and that alone says volumes about what a cinematic feat this thriller is), a movie whose biggest setpiece is the buzzing office of the Washington Post newspaper, a movie with few (if any) dynamic characters, a movie in which the solution to its major mystery is one of the most well-known events in American history. This is not the typical blueprint for an "exciting" movie, and yet All the President's Men is unquestionably one (to me at least). I'm tempted to attribute that excitement to Dustin Hoffman's glorious, glorious hair (just look at those flowing locks!), but honestly, it's the partnership between the dialogue and the wholly unpretentious cinematography. Every line moves the film forward, and every shot frames that line's delivery in the most informative way possible. The film takes to heart the journalistic ideals of clarity and efficiency, which is only fitting for a movie whose centerpiece is a crackerjack bit of journalism. To that effect, All the President's Men is one of the great successes in translating journalism to film and a fantastic bit of proof for the theory that when you've got a good story, the best way to tell it is often to step back and let it tell itself.

78. Modern Times (1936, Charlie Chaplin)
Of all the Chaplin movies I've seen, Modern Times is by far the most caustic, preachy, and socially conscious (though, to be honest, I haven't seen any of his later films, such as The Great Dictator, that have a reputation for actually being preachy, etc.). This is a movie all about the oppression of the working poor by the machinations of management and, of course, the System as a whole, and while these themes are present in plenty of Chaplin's work, Chaplin really goes whole hog into them in Modern Times. This is definitely a Populist work (like, in the political sense), so if you have an aversion to that, I might suggest steering clear. Only... no, I'm not going to suggest that, because Modern Times is an awesome movie, regardless of its (or our) politics. In another movie, all that preachiness might have made the whole enterprise a leaden bore, but the good news about Modern Times is that in addition to being one of Chaplin's preachiest, it's also one of his funniest, and humor covers a multitude of polemics. More so than a lot of Chaplin, Modern Times (particularly in its famous factory scenes) is built around elaborate sets and special-effects-driven sequences; the Tramp's tussles with the huge machinery in these sequences of course serve as metaphors of society's exploitation of the lower class, but they are also hilarious, perfectly timed comedy routines. Futility is a concept that shows the intersection of comedy and tragedy perhaps better than any other, and it's a concept on full display here. Entire swatches of humanity are trapped in a cycle that makes their actions and desires futile, and that's tragic. But seeing Chaplin live out that futility? Comedic gold. I should note that, as with most of Chaplin's work, the human genius of Modern Times is that we are laughing with the Tramp, not at him, as Chaplin's trademark empathy gives him a sort of heroism that avoids making him the butt of the joke. I should also note that, while I've spent most of my time talking about the factory and related aspects of the movie, there's an awful lot more to this film that just that. For example, did you know that there is a subplot at one point, the Tramp does cocaine? Yeah, that one was a shocker when I first saw the movie, too.

Insert perfunctory sign-off/don't forget to let me know what you think. Until next time!

If you fancy, you can read the previous post, #s 73-75, here.
Update: The next post, #s 79-81, is up here.